Friday, July 5, 2013

Countdown City, Shakespeare's Star Wars and The Resurrectionist


What if there were only 77 days left until a deadly asteroid collides with Earth and you're out of a job?
 
That's the predicament Concord Police Detective Hank Palace finds himself in-no job and no future in Countdown City by Ben. H. Winters, published by Quirk Books.

His days of solving crimes are over until a friend from the past reports that her husband is missing.  Reluctantly Hank agrees to help her-not the wisest decision he has ever made.

What he discovers while searching for him is a world teetering on the edge of destruction that is unlike anything he has ever encountered before.

With society falling apart Hank suddenly finds himself enmeshed in a doomsday encampment, an armed anti-immigrant militia and other end-of-days lunacy.

A companion story: part of the Last Policeman Trilogy, finds Hanks asking questions-disturbing questions, about what happens to society when the apocalypse is about to arrive.

George Lucas and William Shakespeare: both well-known names-one for the Star Wars films and one for such plays as King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and so forth.

Imagine what the original Last Hope Star Wars film was written, not by George Lucas, but by William Shakespeare.  How would the Bard handle such characters as Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, C3PO, R2D2, Chewbacca and Princess Leai?

It sounds absurd-but is it really?  After all, Star Wars is nothing more than modern mythology and the stuff of legends.  Are Shakespeare's plays all that much different?

Author Ian Doescher presents William Shakespeare's Star Wars that is written in the famous playwrights prose.  Picture how the characters would look, act, dress and communicate using proper English and Shakespearian plot and pacing.  You might just be pleasantly surprised.

The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black, written and illustrated by E.B. Hudspeth, chronicles the fictional life of the aforementioned doctor beginning with his childhood and culminating in his theory that mythological beasts were actually the evolutionary ancestors of humans.

After an informative introduction readers are given a visual tour of the various mythological creatures anatomical structures in complete detail.  Look for the Minotaur, Cerberus, a dragon, a mermaid and so forth as imagined by the writer/artist. 

After reading and looking over the book you may pose the question, "Is it really so far-fetched?"  And even if you don't subscribe to the theory, the book is a lot of fun to read.